Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Gabriel Allon #22) (53)

“Oui.”

“That’s odd.”

“Why, monsieur?”

“Because this painting appears much older than that. In fact, it looks to me as though it was painted in the late nineteen forties.”

“Lucien used special techniques to make his paintings appear older than they really were.”

Gabriel took down the painting from the wall and turned it over. The canvas was at least a half-century old, as was the stretcher. The upper horizontal bar was stamped with a 6 and an F. On the center bar were the remnants of an old adhesive sticker.

“And did Lucien have special techniques for aging his canvases and stretchers as well? Or did he have a ready supplier of worthless old paintings?”

Fran?oise Vionnet regarded Gabriel calmly with her heavy-lidded eyes. “Get out of my house,” she said through gritted teeth. “Or I’ll sic the dog on you.”

“If that dog comes anywhere near me, I’m going to shoot it. And then I’m going to call the French police and tell them that you and your daughter are living off the money that Lucien Marchand earned forging paintings.”

Her full lips curled into a slight smile. Evidently, she didn’t frighten easily. “Who are you?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She looked at Christopher. “And him?”

“He’s anything but reckless.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to help me find the woman who called herself Miranda álvarez. I’d also like you to give me any additional forgeries you have lying around, along with a complete list of every fake painting Lucien ever sold.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“There are far too many.”

“Who handled them?”

“Lucien sold most of his forgeries to a dealer in Nice.”

“Does the dealer have a name?”

“Edmond Toussaint.”

Gabriel looked at Christopher. “I guess that settles that.”





34

Roussillon




“Why didn’t you simply tell me the truth from the beginning, Monsieur Allon?”

“I was afraid you would skip the pleasantries and go straight to the part about setting the dog on me.”

“Would you have really shot it?”

“Non,” replied Gabriel. “Mr. Reckless would have shot it for me.”

Fran?oise Vionnet eyed Christopher down her freshly lit Gitane, then nodded her head slowly in agreement. They had returned to the table in the rustic kitchen, though now it was a chilled bottle of Bandol rosé around which they were gathered.

“How much of the original story was true?” asked Gabriel.

“Most of it.”

“Where did the fiction begin?”

“Chloé doesn’t spend the winter in Chamonix.”

“Where does she go?”

“Saint-Barthélemy.”

“Does she work there?”

“Chloé?” She made a face. “Not a day in her life. We have a villa in Lorient.”

“Lucien must have painted a lot of twenty-five-euro copies to afford a place like that.”

“He never stopped painting them, you know. He needed some form of legitimate income.”

“When did the fakes start?”

“A couple of years after Chloé and I moved in.”

“It was your idea?”

“More or less.”

“Which is it?”

“It was obvious that Lucien’s copies were very good,” she answered. “One day I asked him whether he thought he could fool anyone. A week later he showed me his first forgery. A reworking of Place du village by the French Cubist Georges Valmier.”

“What did you do with it?”

She took it to Paris and hung it on the wall of a friend’s chic apartment in the Sixth. Then she rang one of the auction houses—which one, she refused to say—and the auction house sent over a so-called expert to have a look at it. The expert asked a couple of questions about the painting’s provenance, declared it authentic, and gave Fran?oise forty thousand euros. She gave two thousand to her chic friend from Paris and the rest to Lucien. They used part of the money to enlarge the villa’s swimming pool and renovate the little outbuilding that Lucien used as his atelier. The rest they deposited in a bank account at Credit Suisse in Geneva.

“As for the reworking of Place du village by Georges Valmier, it recently sold for nine hundred thousand dollars at auction in New York. Which means the auction house made more in fees and commissions than Lucien was paid for his original painting. Who is the criminal, Monsieur Allon? Did the auction house really not realize that it was selling a fake? How is this possible?”

She sold several more forgeries to the same Paris auction house—all lesser-known Cubists and Surrealists, all for five figures—and in the winter of 2004 she sold a Matisse to Galerie Edmond Toussaint. The dealer purchased a second Matisse from Fran?oise a few months later, followed in short order by a Gauguin, a Monet, and a Cézanne landscape of Mont Sainte-Victoire. It was then that Toussaint informed Fran?oise that all five of the paintings she had brought him were forgeries.